BlackBerry’s new security management system aims to give greater trust to smart cities

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BlackBerry is committing to help the private and public sectors come together to boost the development of smart cities and intelligent transportation systems with a Security Credential Management System (SCMS) service.

To address this need, BlackBerry will be making available a SCMS service that provides the mechanism for vehicles and infrastructure, such as traffic lights, to exchange information in a trustworthy and private manner using digital certificates. The company will not charge fees to automakers and public offices involved in smart city and connected vehicle pilots.

The SCMS service is based on BlackBerry’s Certicom technology and offers a secure and reliable hosted Public Key Infrastructure which can manage certificates on behalf of an organisation or an entire ecosystem. The service is designed to scale to support national and transnational deployments, allowing OEMs and public officials to take advantage of a turnkey cloud-based service for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) certificate issuance and lifecycle management.

The first project using new SCMS service will be in partnership with Invest Ottawa, who will leverage it within a secure 16-kilometre road autonomous vehicle test track that resembles a miniature city, complete with pavement markings, traffic lights, stop signs, and pedestrian crosswalks.

In Europe, the EU is supporting Wi-Fi over 5G as the industry decides to what connectivity should be used for connected cars. It is hoping that the approval of technical specifications for one technology over the other will help bring the industry together. Draft proposals from the EU indicate the bloc is preparing to approve Wi-Fi-based standard ‘ITS-G5’ ahead of 5G alternative ‘C-V2X’. ITS-G5 is supported by Volkswagen, Renault, and NXP. Meanwhile, C-V2X is supported by mobile industry players including Huawei, Ericsson, Samsung, and Qualcomm. It has also won over vehicle manufacturers like Ford and Daimler.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the IoT Tech Expo World Series events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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